Hearing-impaired individuals may benefit from communication systems and devices configured to provide assistance in order to communicate with other individuals over a communication network. For example, relay services have been established to provide assistive services (e.g., text captions) to the hearing-impaired user communicating with a communication device (e.g., caption phone, caption enabled device, etc.) that is specifically configured to communicate with the relay service.
In particular, a relay service may be a telecommunication intermediary service, which is intended to permit a deaf or a hearing-impaired person to utilize a normal telephone network. The relay service may include an operator, referred to as a “call assistant,” who serves as a human intermediary between the hearing-impaired user and a far-end user. During a captioning communication session, the call assistant may listen to the audio signal of a far-end user and “revoice” the words of the far-end user to a speech recognition computer program tuned to the voice of the call assistant. A text caption (also referred to as a “caption”) may be generated by the speech recognition computer as a transcription of the audio signal of the far-end user, and then transmitted to the communication device being used by the hearing-impaired user. The communication device may then display the text caption while the hearing-impaired user carries on a normal conversation with the far-end user. The text caption may allow the hearing-impaired user to supplement the voice received from the far-end and confirm his or her understanding of the words spoken by the far-end user.
Such communication devices manage information locally that is also stored remotely, such as contact information and configuration settings. Conventionally, in order to encourage users to be connected to the network and the relay service, modifying the local data was only permitted when there was a network connection to the relay service so that synchronization occurred at the same time as the modification. However, users sometimes had difficulty making modifications at times when the network connection was unreliable (e.g., particularly when used with a wireless network), which caused the modifications to be lost locally.